Caroline Willemen is our project coordinator for Gaza City, in the north of Gaza, Palestine. She updates us on the consequences of food shortages ⬇️ “Many patients across Gaza's healthcare facilities are no longer receiving food; the situation is more desperate than ever. Community kitchens, which provide food for staff and patients, have been unable to do so in some of the facilities where we work in the last few days. In the facilities where there is still food available for patients, it is only a few days' worth of basic goods, without the range of nutrients necessary for recovery or healing. Across all our facilities in the Gaza Strip, we are watching helplessly as the serious medical consequences of these food shortages increase. “On 19 and 20 July, the paediatric and maternity wards in Al-Helou hospital, where MSF medical teams work in northern Gaza, could not provide any food to women and children, and some days there isn’t enough baby formula for the 23 babies in the neonatal intensive care unit. In Nasser hospital, central Gaza, there are currently 168 patients admitted to the paediatric and maternity wards who could not access food on 20 and 21 July. “This lack of food also applies to medical staff. Our Palestinian colleagues live in such precarious situations now, that even if they could afford the food, they could not store any. They have to go day after day to the market to get some daily provisions. If there is nothing in the market, they do not eat. Yet, despite being hungry and exhausted, our colleagues continue to work under these unimaginable circumstances. “The food situation is so dire that every day the question arises whether the patients in the hospitals we support, and the medical staff who care for them, will be able to eat anything at all. We are desperate. As an occupying power the Israeli authorities have an obligation to provide aid to people in Gaza. Right now, they are deliberately starving them.” — Caroline Willemen, MSF project coordinator